by J. Benson
I was rummaging through my locker, dreading the idea that I had left my copy of "The Sun Also Rises" at home. I couldn't find my copy anywhere, it wasn't in my locker, and it wasn't in my messenger bag. I wondered if it was in my car, but I didn't remember ever taking it out in my car. I checked my purse just to be sure it wasn't there. I racked my brain but for the life of me, I couldn't remember where I'd left my book.
"Emma?" The voice in my ear sounded dangerously close.
I jumped. "Shit! Stop doing that!" I cried in alarm. I spun around to face Taylor, who was standing far too close for comfort and looking absolutely amazing in a pair of loose jeans and a button down shirt. His hair looked just as golden and silky as always and his beautiful sparkling blue eyes seemed to glow.
"Sorry." He replied, but I saw the small smile playing on his lips. Clearly, he enjoyed sneaking up on me and scaring the hell out of me. "How are you? Did you finish all of the questions for math last night? I got stuck on questions nine and ten... hey maybe we can compare notes at lunch or something." Taylor said, sighing lightly.
I stared at him for a moment. "You know the answers are at the back of the textbook, right? Compare answers with the back of the book." I pointed out unnecessarily.
"Yeah, but the book won't tell me where I went wrong." He shrugged.
"You should ask someone else." I said, arranging my books. "I'm terrible at math."
"Oh, well that works out. As it turns out, I'm pretty good at math. Maybe I can help you."
"No thank you." I replied. I tucked my books under my arm and shut my locker.
"Can I walk you to class?" Taylor offered as I shut my lock and spun the dial.
"No." I replied. "I'm perfectly capable of finding it on my own." I said icily. It was getting incredibly hard to force myself to be rude to him.
I shut my lock, dropped my lock against the metal of my locker door and began to walk away. I was at least two classrooms away when I heard Taylor's voice travel down the hall toward me.
"I think I know why you left New York," Taylor said from behind me.
I knew he wasn't following me, but I stopped dead in my tracks and slowly turned to face him. I stared at him from several feet away, waiting for him to make his point. He stared back at me like some kind of a silent stand-off.
"Really?" I challenged at last. "Fill me in then. I'm dying to know what you came up with." I replied. The sarcasm in my voice could have been cut with an axe.
He nodded and took a step toward me. That one step felt too close. "Your parents smothered you, and you needed to assert your independence. So you came out here because you wanted to prove to your parents that you could run your own life and make your own decisions."
With my own sick sense of humor, I started to laugh dryly. He was not even close.
"You..." I paused to reconsider my response. "You are not nearly as smart as you think you are. Do you know that?" I turned my back on him and jogged up the stairs toward the second floor. I walked into class just before the bell rang and took my seat. I opened my notebook to a fresh page and neatly wrote the date in the top right hand corner of the page.
I was still fuming at Taylor when he arrived in class; he sauntered down the aisle next to me. However, on his way past, he dropped my copy of "The Sun Also Rises" on my desk. Instead of taking his usual seat at the back of the class, slipped into the chair directly behind mine. I straightened up in my seat, feeling awkward and defensive.
It was completely unlike him to choose that seat, and there was no logical reason for him to sit so close to the front. He must have only chosen that seat to sit closer to me. This meant that the entire time he was sitting there; he was going to be bothering me.
I rolled my eyes irritably.
There was no way out now. It would draw attention to the both of us if I stood up and moved. There was no way I could escape with subtlety. I chewed anxiously at my lips.
The teacher turned her back to the class in order to write some literary terms and definitions on the board and as I wrote them down, Taylor leaned forward to whisper to me.
"You dropped that book yesterday, before you yelled at me." He supplied, unknowingly answering the question I had been mentally asking myself. "You picked up the rest of the books, but you left that one behind. I took it home and brought it back for you today."
I chewed on my lips in annoyance. I wondered if he was looking for some all-encompassing expression of my gratitude. I wondered if he was waiting for me to proclaim that he had saved my life by returning my battered and well-used copy of "The Sun Also Rises" to me. I wasn't going to grant him the satisfaction of thanking him.
He was quiet for a moment, then continued. "That's an interesting bookmark you've got in there."
I moved the book closer to my body and hunched around it, so Taylor wouldn't know I was granting him the satisfaction of listening to him. I opened the book and realized what he was talking about. I had used the first thing I found at the bottom of my purse to mark the page. It just happened to be my father's blue hospital band from Mercy General; the hospital where he spent the last eight months of his life.
I felt sick to my stomach. Now the truth was out. Tears sprang into my eyes. I shut my eyes tightly to trap the tears inside. My bottom lip trembled as I ran my fingers along the plastic wrist band with my father's name emblazoned on it. Unwanted memories flooded into my head, waiting just behind my closed eye lids. None of these memories were happy ones.
"So who is H. James, Randal?" Taylor asked behind me. "Is he your boyfriend?"
I wanted to get up and run from the room, but I didn't want Taylor to know that the things he was saying hurt me more than anything else he could ever say would hurt. I wanted to be anywhere but here at this very moment.
"Mr. Green!" Mrs. North turned around sharply and focused her eyes on Taylor. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and squinted through them before she continued. "Is this conversation something that you'd like to share with the whole class?"
"Err... No, Mrs. North." Taylor mumbled. He sounded like a child caught doing something he shouldn't. His usual cocky demeanor was suddenly and inexplicably gone.
I kept my eyes shut tightly.
"Good, now pay attention and leave Miss Hatfield alone so she can do her work." Mrs. North scolded.
I couldn't resist a smile, while the rest of the classmates snickered. Mrs. North was not my favorite teacher, but I was suddenly and eternally grateful for the fact that she had rescued me from an awkward conversation that I didn't want to have.
I slowly opened my eyes, drawing in a slow breath. My heart was beating hard and fast in my chest. The hammering of my heart was so loud that it echoed loudly in my ears. It was the sound of my fragile heart breaking all over again. A sound I was all too familiar with.
I shook my head and tried to distract myself.
I turned my attention back to the chalk board, trying to write what the teacher was copying out. She wasn't defining the terms by memory; she had a sheet of paper in her left hand that she was copying meticulously from. I wondered why she couldn't have just photocopied the page, and made everything a lot simpler. This served as a distraction for a few all-too-brief seconds.
From behind me, a folded wad of lined paper came soaring over my right shoulder and onto the desk in front of me. At first I thought it might have been some kind of a prank or a new form of a spit ball.
I rolled my eyes but carefully unfolded the paper.
In the center of the page Taylor had sloppily scrawled "Go to the dance with me."
I picked up my pen again and in large block letters wrote "No." and slipped the note back over my shoulder to drop on his desk.
Within a few brief moments, the folded paper came back over my shoulder. This time he had written "Why?"
I wrote back. "Because I don't want to." I held the paper over my shoulder and before I could drop it onto his desk, he took the paper from my hand. His warm fingers brushed mine.
&nbs
p; "That isn't a reason. Give me an actual reason why you won't go out with me." Taylor's handwriting was getting worse. He had scratched out several responses before he had decided to write what he'd written. I shook my head.
I sighed and replied. "Because you write like an eight year old boy." and sent the paper back over my shoulder.
"That isn't a reason." He wrote back.
"I find you annoying and childish. Is that a good enough reason?" I sent back to him.
I heard him tear a new sheet of paper out of his notebook. But before he could write to me, Mrs. North turned around again.
"Mr. Green.... Would you please accompany me at the front of the class?" Mrs. North said suddenly.
I jumped; suddenly afraid we had been caught passing notes. Heartbreak and misery I could deal with. Spending detention with Taylor for passing notes back and forth was a level of mortification that I couldn't handle.
The boys at the back of the class snickered again.
"What?" Taylor asked in disbelief.
"There's a seat right here, would you kindly pack your things and move up here?" Mrs. North pointed to the seat directly in front of her desk and impatiently waited for Taylor to pack his things and move up front.
Taylor sighed and screeched back his chair. He noisily gathered his books and stomped to the front of the class. He plopped down in his chair, and pretended to take notes. As soon as Mrs. North turned around to write on the chalk board again, Taylor turned and looked at me. I pretended not to notice, keeping my gaze fixed on the teacher and the notes on the board behind him.
By the time class ended, I had compulsively chewed at my lips until they were raw and bleeding.
Chapter 13:
Hospital Food
At lunch, I went straight to my locker. I had almost all but forgotten about my irritated conversations with Taylor that morning. In fact, I had almost completely pushed all thoughts of Taylor from my mind. However, when I reached my locker I found a note written in Taylor's sloppy handwriting. He was asking for me to meet him at lunch. I could hardly make out the childish scribbles. But the message was clear; he wanted to eat lunch with me.
I secretly hoped he would forget. I hoped he would fall off the face of the earth or come down with a spontaneous illness to keep me from having to talk to him again. I wasn't sure I could even look at him.
However, due to the fantastic luck I'd been having lately, before I could get my lunch out of my locker and locate my car keys from my purse, Taylor was standing next to me. He managed to angle his long, slender frame against the bordering lockers. I had hoped I could escape to my car without having to have any further contact with him. It seemed that avoiding him was becoming impossible.
As I slowly shut my locker door, I noticed that he was peering out from under his long blond eyelashes, casting subtle glances at the people as they passed.
I was suddenly aware of how closely I was standing next to him. I took a step back for personal space. "Hi," I murmured, and covered my nervousness with a heavy sigh. I was hoping to convey boredom and not nervousness or anxiety.
"Hey." He smiled at me and instantly moved away from my locker so he was standing directly upright.
"I figured we could eat in the cafeteria today." Taylor was saying from the other side of my locker door. "I know you usually eat at your locker... or in your car..."
"I'm not eating lunch with you." I argued.
"Emma, come on. It's no big deal. It's just lunch." Taylor shrugged.
I eyed my lunch that my grandmother had lovingly prepared for me. It was in a brown paper bag, and I dreaded the thought of someone witnessing me eat from it. At my old school, the kids who ate from brown paper bags were not the cool kids. It was so generic and clichéd, I wondered if it would be viewed negatively if I ate from the brown paper bag in front of people who purchased their food in the cafeteria.
Making a rash and quick decision, I opened my locker again. I grabbed my wallet from the shelf in my locker. "Let’s go." I forced a smile which could only be described as overly fake and followed him toward the cafeteria. I was at his side the moment we crossed the threshold into the large open area filled with round tables. The tables were designed to fit no more than ten students at a time, but there were upward of twenty crammed into some.
I was sure I could feel every pair of eyes in the room turning toward me; possibly the plainest and most unusual student in the entire school walking into the cafeteria with Taylor. Walking into the cafeteria with him was like being an everyday nobody walking alongside a famous movie star. In terms of appearances, we were not evenly matched. He was a thousand times more beautiful than I was. I was plain and ordinary standing next to him.
I closed my eyes tightly in an extended blink, hoping I was imagining things, but when I opened my eyes again I knew I wasn't imagining anything. Two girls at a nearby table leaned together to whisper, and I hoped they weren't talking about me. My fragile self-esteem couldn't handle this.
"This way," Taylor proceeded, dropping a hand casually on my lower back. I could feel a slight rose rise in my cheeks, and I silently prayed no one else could see it. This was a bad idea, and this reception had simply confirmed it. I was in way over my head here, and everyone in the cafeteria knew it. Including me. Only Taylor was oblivious.
Wordlessly, I let Taylor lead me to a narrow galley filled with students. I knew this would be my second mistake, as soon as the familiar scent reached my nose. My stomach began to turn and I was feeling nauseated. The smell of frying preprocessed foods brought back the familiar flood of unpleasant memories and all too frequent trips to the hospital cafeteria.
Taylor was already in one of the lines, and placed two bright blue trays on the counter, sliding them along, so I wouldn't have to push my own.
I glanced at the woman on the other side of the counter. Her white smock and hairnet brought back memories that I was more than anxious to forget. I quickly looked away, blinking back tears in my eyes which could have either come from the stench of the food or from the buried memories.
Taylor promptly placed his order. I couldn't hear what he said, but I was sure it seemed like a lot for someone of his lean build. The voices around me became a low din of white noise. I glanced around quickly, my eyes darting from the soda machine to the glass fridge containing Styrofoam cups of pudding and plastic cups of Jell-O. My throat was dry. The room spun around me.
I could feel eyes on me, and knew I probably looked a little green around the edges.
"Emma?" Taylor's voice interrupted me. "Emma? You want anything?"
I darted my attention back to Taylor, whose azure eyes were studying me carefully in confusion. The woman behind the counter looked bored but expectant. It took me a little longer to respond. I had to shake away the fog in my brain and all of the hazy memories that waited just below the surface of my self-conscious.
"No, no." I said quickly, without much thought to my words. "I don't like hospital food." I blurted out.
I caught the mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I turned away from Taylor and grabbed the first thing that didn't remind me of a hospital cafeteria and placed it on my tray. It was a bottle of diet soda. A safe choice.
The woman behind the counter was snickering, thinking I had made some kind of a droll joke, but Taylor's eyes were sparkling with confusion. I felt sick and dizzy, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to back myself out of my verbal mistake. How was I going to explain the wrong words coming out of my mouth to Taylor?
However, I knew the similarities were uncanny. The display, the food itself and above all, the toxic smell had all the elements of prepackaged, and stomach churning hospital food that I had practically lived off of for three long years.
In a stupor, I followed Taylor from the galley. He had placed my bottle of diet coke on his tray and carried it for me. He had even paid for it, without me noticing. I decided to let it slip; I wasn't going to fight with him over a-dollar-twenty-five.
> "T-man! Over here!" One of his buddies called from three tables that had been pushed together to accommodate a large mass of people in the center of the cafeteria.
I shot a glance toward them, seeing one of his male friends standing and waving us over, unnecessarily. I could see two of the girls at the table whispering to each other. The expression on the small bottle-blonde girl was far from pleased. She was glaring at me like she was trying to set me on fire with her mind.
I opened my mouth to speak to Taylor, but before I could form my mouth around an excuse, Taylor held up one hand in a small wave, while balancing the tray on his other hand. He must have read the fear and dread that was probably written all over my face. He decided against sitting with his friends and I felt more relief than I could possibly express.
"Uh... no thanks, I think we're going to sit over here, today. Thanks!" Taylor flashed an award-winning grin and led me toward an empty table with only two bright orange chairs remaining.
I followed him in a daze, feeling like I was an animal in a cage, on display for the world to see.
"Here, sit." He urged, sliding the tray onto the table between the two chairs. I dropped myself heavily onto one chair, and clutched the sides of the seat numbly with my hands. I let my dark curls fall in front of my face, trying to hide my embarrassment. I hated myself, without any conscious effort from my brain; I had just given away far more information than necessary.
Taylor reached into his plate of fries and offered some to me.
I shook my head in great exaggeration; another mistake. I could see the eyes of the few people who were still glancing at me curiously.
It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn't the animal in the cage: I was the freak at the freak show. I was the bearded lady of this high school, and all eyes were on me.